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In adopting the Natural Gas Act (NGA), Congress determined that wholesale natural gas pricing issues should be the exclusive preserve of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and thus that State efforts to regulate the wholesale market were preempted. Courts uniformly barred States from seeking to regulate any “practice . . . affect[ing]” the wholesale rates charged by natural gas companies—until a 2013 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision that is the subject of a pending Supreme Court certiorari petition. ONEOK, Inc. v. Learjet, Inc., No. 13-271. The decision below would permit plaintiffs’ lawyers to proceed with antitrust challenges under state laws to industry practices that directly affected wholesale prices. The court reasoned that preemption was inappropriate because the challenged practices also directly affected a small number of retail natural gas sales.

In response to an invitation from the justices, the Solicitor General of the United States last week filed a brief urging that certiorari be denied. Interestingly, however, the Solicitor General’s brief agrees with the defendants (natural gas suppliers who engage primarily in wholesale transactions) that the Ninth Circuit’s anti-preemption ruling was dead wrong. The Solicitor General recommends against Supreme Court review primarily because he concludes that other courts are unlikely to repeat the Ninth Circuit’s error, particularly with respect to transactions arising after Congress revised the NGA in 2005. But in light of the Ninth Circuit’s fundamental misunderstanding of the scope of NGA preemption, I am far less sanguine that it will eventually see the error of its ways. Unless review is granted, there is every reason to believe that the Ninth Circuit will adhere to its anti-preemption precedent in future cases.

On ten or more occasions every term, the justices request the views of the Solicitor General on whether the Court should grant specific certiorari petitions. The Solicitor General correctly recognizes in his ONEOK brief that merely because the decision below was incorrect is not alone sufficient grounds to recommend that review be granted. The Court has limited the size of its docket to about 75 cases per term. The justices thus usually adhere to the dictates of Supreme Court Rule 10, which states that the Court generally will grant certiorari only in cases that raise an “important question of federal law” and that have decided the question in a manner that conflicts with a relevant decision of the Supreme Court or other appellate courts. Accordingly, the Solicitor General not infrequently recommends that the Court deny a certiorari petition even though he concludes, as here, that the decision below was incorrectly decided.